Check LSF for details on individual times/classes.

Courses Winter 2024/25

In the winter term 2024/25 NamLitCult is offering the following classes:

For additional information and detailed descriptions, look up the summer term course pages. All departmental courses are also listed in the course directory (LSF) maintained by the university.

VL American Regional Literatures and Cultures 

Tue, 12-14 

This lecture course offers a topographial survey of U.S.-American literature by focusing on the importance of various sites and places that have gained prominence in the formation of a specifically American literature (especially New England and the South). While the focus will be on early American literature, we will also look into the tradition of local color in the late 19th century. We will start the course by tracing American literature to its Puritan beginnings, focusing on the spiritual autobiography and the Indian captivity narrative. We will also focus on the Southern colonies and analyze the writings by Captain John Smith and William Byrd. In the 19th century we will look at emergence of regional literature, the main New England texts of the American Renaissance and the local color literature of both New England and the South.

Course Readings: 

There will be a course reader, which will be made available on Teams.

BA/MA/STEX Colloquium 

Tue, 16-18 

This workshop-like colloquium allows candidates (BA-students, MA-students and Stex-students) to talk about the topics of their theses and the topics for their oral exams.  

This colloquium consists of two parts:  

1) “Blockkolloquium” in October for those students who will participate in the oral state exam (LS I, LS I+II, LAB). All topics can be presented and discussed. Please bring handouts for your brief presentations. This “Blockkolloquium” will take place on October 15, 2024. 

Please sign up for the Blockkolloquium (amerikanistik[at]mx.uni-saarland.de).  

2) Workshop for those students who will write/or are working on their BA, MA or Staatsexamensarbeit. A major goal of this course is to guide students through the process of writing a research paper. All candidates in NamLitCult who are working on a written thesis are therefore encouraged to attend regularly. 

This colloquium starts on October22, 2024. The exact dates of when these workshops will meet will be discussed in the first session.  

Please sign up via LSF.  

Research Colloquium 

Tue, 18-20; online 

This research colloquium offers writers of Ph.D. dissertations a forum for presentations of their work-in-progress. It will start on October 22, 2024. 

HS “Forms Moulded For Us”: The Many Genres of Susan Glaspell 

Wed. 12-14 

Geöffnet für Gender Zertifikat: 

 “The most important woman playwright of her time, a successful novelist, the mainstay of the Provincetown Players, a fine actor in her own works, and a leading writer chronicling feminist struggles of the period: Susan Glaspell was one of the most respected ‘strange bedfellows,’ as Steven Watson has called those who brought modernism to America. And yet today she is virtually unknown” (Ben-Zvi ix). Since Linda Ben-Zvi published this assessment in her 2005 biography Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times, Glaspell’s work has garnered increased critical attention, although the majority of her writings remain out of print. The lion’s share of this critical interest is invested in Glaspell’s theatrical oeuvre. This is hardly surprising, given her role as co-founder of Provincetown Players, a theatre group that is credited with bringing modern theatre to the United States, and the Pulitzer Prize she received in 1931 for her play Alison’s House. And yet, one of the most impressive aspects of Susan Glaspell’s literary career is the range of genres in which she worked and experimented. Indeed, she was equally at home in drama, novel, and short story (not to mention her journalism and her innovative take on biography). Feminism, the exploration of Midwestern character, the relationship between the past and the present, and the meaning of America are all important topics that permeate her work, and she frequently shifts the same theme between genres to develop it further. In this class, we will concern ourselves with selected examples of Susan Glaspell’s writings in different genres, not only to better understand her role in and influence on American literary history, but also to gain insights into larger patterns of this history, from the dynamics of modernism in America to the establishment of modern American theatre.           

Students will be expected to have read the respective texts in advance of the class and to come prepared to discuss their own ideas in relation to them. 

Readings 

Novel 

Fidelity (1915) 

This novel is out of print, but an electronic version of it is available through Project Gutenberg. Please use the following link to access it:  

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32432/32432-h/32432-h.htm 

Plays 

The Verge (1921) 

Inheritors (1921) 

Short Stories 

“His America” (1912) 

“The Plea” (1912) 

“A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) 

You do not need to purchase any readings for this class.

Dr. Tobias Schank 

PS (Un-)Writing the Frontier: (De-)Colonizing the Americas in Word, Song, and Image 

Thursdays, 12-14 

The frontier, famously theorized by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 as the crucible of U.S. American character, has long served as a pivotal concept to justify and legitimatize American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. Marking the ever-shifting line that in the minds of many Western thinkers separated civilization from wilderness – territory conquered and transformed and territory yet-to-be-conquered and transformed by settler colonialism – the frontier condenses a plethora of discourses that have shaped and continue to shape North America. In this seminar, we will take a closer look at a variegated selection of texts that have historically served to construct, cement, but also challenge the frontier. Asserting a decolonial position, we will use these texts to interrogate the significance of the frontier as well as its ramifications for the struggle for a more equitable and sustainable coexistence in North America. 

Readings may include (final syllabus will be presented in the first session): 

J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, “What is an American?” (1782)  

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) 

Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902) 

E. Pauline Tekahionwake Johnson, “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (1913) 

Raoul Walsh, THE BIG TRAIL (1930) 

John Ford, THE SEARCHERS (1956) 

Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (1993) 

Zacharias Kunuk/Natar Ungalaaq, MALIGLUTIT (2016) 

C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020) 

Rody Walker (Protest the Hero), “Little Snakes” (2020) 

Jon Krieger (Blackbraid), “Barefoot Ghost Dance on Blood Soaked Soil” (2022) 

Requirements: 

Active participation, including reading/watching and writing assignments, participation in class discussion, a short presentation, and a seminar paper (6000 words). 

PS In Other Wor(l)ds: Margaret Atwood’s Short Fiction 

Thursday, 16-18 

A 2 2, room 120.1 

Discussing Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s collection of tales Stone Mattress (2014), Coral Ann Howells argues that it “is a veritable sampler of genre fiction revisited, with one crime story, two vampire stories, three interconnected fantasy stories, two Gothic horror stories, and a final dystopia.” Apart from the genres listed in this quote, Atwood frequently writes speculative fiction and uses folk elements such as fables and fairy tales. In this course, we will explore how some of Atwood’s short fiction moves away from realism and blends and undermines the everyday and the uncanny, the real and the imagined, covering a variety of themes such as critique of society, gender, the environment, science, and art, to name but a few. 

A selection of texts will be provided via Moodle. 

HS Mediterranean Crossings: Passage, Seawater and Borders 

teilgeblockt tba 

This course looks at literary and cinematic texts to examine how these texts narrate the encounter 

between refuges and the sea. Drawing on a handful of secondary material, we will attempt to 

unpack the political and aesthetic meanings attached to maritime crossings, the ways these 

narratives engage with legal and affective archives, with the politics of Fortress Europe, but also 

with the sea as a watery space whose properties both enable and disable the passages in question. 

We will therefore look also at how these cultural texts represent the materiality of seawater and the ways refugees inhabit and make use of this highly volatile realm to navigate not only the sea itself but also the bordering practices Europe deploys as it relies on the properties of seawater to enforce borders in places where there are none. 

PRIMARY SOURCES 

Helon Habila: Travellers (2019) 

Omar El Akkad: What Strange Paradise (2021) 

Remi Weekes (dir): His House (2020) 

Mati Diop (dir.): Atlantics (2019) 

SECONDARY SOURCES 

Davies, Thom, Arshad Isakjee and Surindar Dhesi. “Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical 

Experience of Refugees in Europe.” Antipode, 2017, 49:5, pp. 1263-1284. 

Dickson, Andonea Jon. “Mobility control in ungovernable spaces: Cultivating the 

Mediterranean’s fatal materiality.” EPC: Politics and Space, 39:5, 2021, pp. 993-1010. 

Heller, Charles and Lorenzo Pezzani. “Liquid Traces: Investigating the Deaths of Migrants at the 

EU’s Maritime Frontier.” Nicholas de Genova (ed.). The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. London and Durhma: Duke University Press, 2017. 

Pugliese, Joseph. “Technologies of Extraterritorialization, Statist Visuality and Irregular Migrants and Refugees.” Griffith Law Review, 2013, 22:3, pp. 571-597. 

Rygiel, Kim. “Dying to live: migrant deaths and citizenship politics along European borders: 

transgressions, disruptions, and mobilizations.” Citizenship Studies, 2016, 20:5, pp. 545-560. 

Tamalet, Edwige. “Seawater.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2021, 25:2, pp. 207-217. 

Introduction to Media Studies: Upload - Reflections on Technology, AI and Robots in American Media, Culture and Society 

Monday, 10-12 

Future technologies from (Sci-fi) movies and TV series—such as touch screens, video calls or VR glasses—have long become an important part of our everyday lives. Media are everywhere around us; we consume, use, mediate and digest media daily. Most of these media are—and have become—digital; books, newspapers, or physical films become relics when they are transferred into the well-connected and omnipresent digital sphere. As media also mirror and influences the society they are produced in, media productions such as movies and series are a fruitful subject within the field of cultural studies. Artificial intelligence(s) and future technologies have interested and fascinated directors and viewers but also influenced developments in computer science and artificial intelligence, which then inspired directors for new media productions. 

This course introduces students to the study of media and its interrelations with culture, society, and itself, laying particular emphasis on film studies and gender representations within media on the theoretical level. After an overview on various aspects of media history, media theory, and media analysis, we will reflect on the roles of and interconnections between media, technology, culture, and society as well as their representations in the media, especially in the Prime Video series Upload. The sci-fi series will serve as a starting point from which to analyze the mutual influences of media, culture, and society with a focus on technology from various angles. Although the course focuses on a specific series and genre, the students will be provided with a toolkit to critically analyze media productions in general and from various angles. 

We/you will take the closest look on Upload (2020-present), available on Amazon Prime Video, as well as related productions, depending on their availability on streaming platforms (Netflix, Prime, Disney+) during the summer term. Possible media productions to investigate are e.g.: 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 

Total Recall (1990) 

The Fifth Element (1997) 

The Matrix franchise (1999-2021) 

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) 

Minority Report (2002) 

I, Robot (2004) 

WALL-E (2008) 

Surrogates (2009) 

Total Recall (2012) 

Pacific Rim (2013) 

Detroit: Become Human (2018) 

Altered Carbon (2018-2020) 

Love, Death & Robots (2019-present) 

Upload (2020-present) 

You will watch some of the films completely, I will use excerpts from others in class. You may, of course, watch all of them! If you have a specific American sci-fi production in mind, which you would like to work on although it is not on this list, no problem. Over the first weeks of the semester, you will have time to explore the corpus and find a media production and topic to work on in your presentation and short paper. 

Readings and material: a selection of texts will be provided; the films we will work with are available on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ respectively. 

Requirements: The introductory part of the course will be accompanied by readings and small writing assignments, students will give a presentation, either in class or as a recording (depending on the number of participants), and write a short paper, which has to be handed in until March 31.

Bemerkung: 

Dieser Kurs kann in das Zertifikat "Digitalität. KI. Gesellschaft" eingebracht werden. Sollten Sie an dieser Option interessiert sein, tragen Sie einfach das Zertifikat auf dem Deckblatt ein. Weitere Infos zum Zertifikat finden Sie unter: https://www.uni-saarland.de/studieren/optionalbereich/zertifikate/mensch-gesellschaft-ki.html 

Introduction to Cultural Studies North America 

Thursday, 12-14 

B 3 1, Lecture hall I 

This course is intended to provide a foundational understanding of cultural myth(s), production, and analysis. This lecture will primarily focus on the United States but will feature some Canadian history and culture. The first section of the course will be dedicated to a general survey of contemporary political and social issues to prepare students for more in-depth discussions and approaches while inviting students to challenge common stereotypes. The second section will provide an overview of theoretical approaches to North American Cultural Studies with a focus on the historical development of policy, media, race, gender, and class. The course’s historical focus will primarily be centered around understanding how events in the twentieth- and twenty-first century have contributed to present-day American national identity formation. We will explore how popular narratives aim to encompass multiculturalism, while also working to universalize the American experience and what it means to be “American.” 

We will discuss issues regarding race, class, gender, sexuality, discrimination, violence, and slavery. It is my intention to create a safe space for all participants to learn and engage with this discourse, as well as understand/respect different perspectives. 

Most readings will be from Neil Campbell & Alasdair Kean, American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture. Fourth edition. (Routledge, 2016). It is recommended students focusing on American Studies purchase this text. For this class, select chapters and sections will be made available. 

UE CS II North America: True Crime: Narrative & Ethics 

Wednesday, 10-12 

The true crime genre has persisted throughout North American history, adapting its narrative to incorporate contemporary morality and societal anxieties. As culture changed with the passage of time, so too did the genre’s truthfulness with each narrative turn. For many in the modern era, its salacious and gruesome nature has often been perceived as lowbrow and perhaps not as “true” as the title implies. Yet, Early Modern true crime pamphlets were produced for and read by the literate elite, who frequently perceived them as containing important moral truths. In a post-truth mediascape, true crime again began to be regarded as containing truth in questioning the truth of the past. This current iteration has, in some cases, influenced real-world outcomes by incorporating public discourse about law enforcement accountability, social justice, and justice reform. While such consequences are highly emotive, it is important to consider how adjusting narrative can influence the perception of not only truth, but also of morality and ethical story telling. This course will examine the intersection of ethics, media, society, and culture through narrative trends in true crime.  

This course is part of a joint project with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland and will culminate in a joint (hybrid) workshop with University of Silesia students and lecturers. 

Note: It is important for students to understand this course will contain some unpleasant and disturbing subject matter. While this course is about the true crime genre, the focus of this course is not on violence, suffering, and trauma. It is about learning how to tell human stories with respect, as well as learning how to navigate and critically engage with mediascapes that often monetize and sensationalize violent crime. 
 

Reading requirements: A selection of texts and multimedia materials will be provided. 

UE CS II North America: Race, Class, Gender in Borderlands Film and Media 

Thursday, 12-14 

MA Border Studies: 

Specialization Module C1: Interculturality and Diversity 

Crossgelistet für Masterstudiengang Lateinamerika? 

Anrechenbar für Zertifikat Gender Studies (Aufbaumodul 2: Aktuelle Fragestellungen der Genderforschung) 

Anrechenbar für Zertifikat Angewandte Pop Studien (Pflichtmodul 1: Interdisziplinäre Einführung in die Popkultur) 

This class will investigate representations of borders and border crossings in (US-)American film and media, especially representations of US-Mexican borderlands. Students will be familiarized with selected theoretical readings to help them critically analyze our corpus mainly consisting of films and selected examples from TV series and other media forms. Focusing on the analysis of representations of borders, border conflicts and border crossings, we will investigate in how far intersections of race, class, gender and other factors are connected to dominant/hegemonic discourses or counter-narratives and how (US) American media include or exclude / represent or misrepresent certain groups. We will investigate how media productions are shaped by current discourses in society while they at the same time add to these discourses. Our corpus will include, among others, the movies No Country for Old Men (2007, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005, dir. Tommy Lee Jones, written by Guillermo Arriaga) and Babel (2006, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, written Guillermo Arriaga). 

Readings/materials: A selection of relevant secondary sources will be made available in electronic form. We will discuss access options for the films in the first session. 

Course requirements: Completion of reading assignments, a short (oral) presentation, and a short written assignment at the end of the course. Students are required to watch (excerpts) from movies etc. in advance of the sessions in which we discuss them. Regular attendance and active participation in seminar discussions is expected. 

Erfolg in Serie: Staffel XII 

Dr. Svetlana Seibel 

Pflichtmodul 2 

22 Oct. 2024 – The West Wing (Marc-Oliver Frisch)  

29 Oct. 2024 – Designated Survivor (Svetlana Seibel)  

03 Dec. 2024 – The Bridge (Astrid M. Fellner)  

10 Dec. 2024 – South Park (Danielle Kopf-Giammanco)  

All presentations on Tuesdays Evenings, starting 7 pm. 

Kino Achteinhalb, Nauwieserstraße 19, Saarbrücken. 

No entrance fee. 

Vortragsreihe im Rahmen des Zertifikats "Angewandte Pop-Studien." 

Offen für alle Interessierten. 

Prüfungsleistung im Rahmen des Zertifikats: Portfolio. Details erfragen Sie bitte bei Dr. Svetlana Seibel.